Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Think
‘Hendrix’, and the first image that comes to mind is the onstage Jimi –
a sensual inferno of improvisatory creativity, fingertips ablaze; Jimi
the aural arsonist, sonically torching the Stars and Stripes; Jimi the
Dionysian dandy, the pyrotechnician who put the flambé into flamboyance.
But – and you knew this was coming right? – there was another side to
Hendrix that runs against this pat if not entirely misleading image:
Hendrix the diligent, patient craftsman, the ‘studio rat’ who
methodically pieced together Electric Ladyland over several months of
ten hours per night, all week long work. Some Ladyland songs were re-mixed three hundred times.

If
Jimi onstage was a case of never-mind-the-Pollocks, a volcanic
spermatozoic splurge of garish gushing expressionism, in the studio he
was more a landscape painter, endlessly layering overdubs, tweaking
equalisers and echo buttons, trying out new effects and arrangement
ideas. With Electric Ladyland, Jimi exhibited the kind of
obsessive detail-oriented perfectionism you associate with ultra-white,
classicist-not-Romanticist auteurs such as Brian Wilson, Paul
McCartney/George Martin, Todd Rundgren, even Brian Eno. This isn't a
Dionysian lineage (frenzy, intoxication, orgiastic chaos – think Stones,
Doors, Stooges) but an Appollonian one (Apollo being the god of
serenity, sanity – art as contemplation, Nature garden).

As
well as this unlikely white company, you could also place Hendrix in a
black lineage of studio science and producer wizardry – Lee Perry,
George Clinton, Sun Ra, Prince. In the ‘Afro Futurist’ pantheon, the
band leader or producer orchestrates all the sonic strands into
funkadelic symphonies, using texture, polyrhythm, and multi-track
spatiality to weave what critic Kodwo Eshun calls "sonic fiction". A
crucial aspect of this producer-led approach is that effects and studio
as-instrument processing are as important as the musicianship. In
Hendrix's case, the two things were always inseparable: using wah-wah,
sustain, distortion, fuzz-tone, feedback modulated by the tremolo arm,
etc, he refracted the blues into a vast spectrum of timbres. And this
was a pretty radical idea at the time. When Jimi did a session for Radio
One, the crusty old BBC engineers were hopelessly confused, and in the
end the producer had to speak up: "Look here, Jimi, I'm terribly sorry,
but we seem to be getting quite a bit of distortion and feedback and
can't seem to correct it."

As Hendrix's music evolved,
its timbre-saturated colour motion got more ultra-vivid and
kaleidoscopic. It also got more spatialised. ‘3rd Stone From the Sun’, a
sirocco roar of controlled feedback and one of the few songs on Are You Experienced? to extend beyond three minutes, looks ahead to Ladyland's
studio-spun immensities, and further still – to the drone swarm daze of
My Bloody Valentine (who worked with Roger Mayer, the geezer who built
FX pedals and technical gizmos for Jimi), to Husker Du's wig-out
blizzardry, to Sonic Youth's "reinvention of the guitar". Jimi's guitar
becomes increasingly gaseous and contourless, like radiation or a
forcefield in which the listener is suspended. Contemporary rockcrit
Richard Meltzer described how Hendrix replaced the "tunnel space" of
conventional rock production (the guitarist distinctly positioned in the
stereo-field) with "paisley space" (a wormholey, fractal surroundsound
with Jimi coming at you from all sides, from behind you, sometimes
seemingly from inside you). Electric Ladyland had a ‘3D
sound’ that, Jimi later complained, the technicians who transferred the
masters to vinyl "screwed up… they didn't know how to cut it properly.
They thought it was out of phase."

Jimi's music was
about space in another sense. His lyrics are full of extra-terrestrial
journeys and kosmik imagery – ‘3rd Stone’'s Barbarella-like
request, "may I land my kinky machine?", and bizarre narrative about
aliens visiting Earth, deciding chickens are the smartest species, then
blowing up the planet; the imagery of "Jupiter sulphur mines/Way down by
the Methane Sea" in ‘Voodoo Chile’; the solar system tour guide of ‘The
Stars That Play With Laughing Sam's Dice’, a title that
non-coincidentally acronyms the hallucinogens STP and LSD; unreleased
songs like ‘South Saturn Delta’ and ‘Valleys of Neptune’. Jimi was an
avid consumer of sci-fi, fantasy, and all forms of mysticism. His
obsessions included the I Ching, numerology, astrology and the symbolist
poets' belief that there are synaesthetic correspondences between
colours and sounds; he believed he had ESP and could recall astral
travels. All these traits came together in his dream of an "electric
religion". He died before he could pull together the overtly
transcendentalist double album, First Rays Of The New Rising Sun,
his hymn to the Eternal Cosmic Feminine, featuring songs like ‘Hey Baby
(The Land Of The New Rising Sun’ about a female messiah leading
humanity to the promised land.

Like other
Afro-Futurists, Hendrix was as interested in mythic antiquity as in the
outerspatial tomorrow – Nubia, Atlantis, the whole "ancient to the
future" (Art Ensemble of Chicago) shtick. His song ‘Pali Gap’ was named
after the Hawaian goddess of the volcanoes aka Pele (beating fellow
space cadet Tori Amos by a couple of decades). ‘Purple Haze’ was
influenced by Hopi Indian myths, and ‘Voodoo Chile’ taps into West
African magick via Haiti and New Orleans. In terms of his own mystique,
Jimi achieved a double-whammy, being half black and half-Native
American. For the beats and the hippies, blacks and Red Indians
represented two kinds of authenticity and exoticism that beckoned as
alternatives to consumerland emptiness: blacks incarnated passion,
sexuality, energy, soul, and Native Americans represented mystery,
ritual, ceremony, a non-alienated relationship with the land.

The
culmination of all these tendencies – the black science fiction, the
studio wizardry, and the alienation from contemporary Western industrial
culture – was Ladyland's closing song suite, ‘1983 … (A Merman I
Should Turn To Be)’, and ‘Moon, Turn the Tides… Gently, Gently Away’.
The lyrical scenario is Jimi and girlfriend abandoning a war torn,
despoiled Earth for a subaquatic paradise, ignoring their sceptical
friends who argue "the machine, that we built, would never save us… it's
impossible for a man to live and breathe under water… anyway, you know
good well it would be beyond the will of God". Flouting the patriarchal
reality-principle,
Jimi and his water babe are reborn as aquanauts in a womb-like
wonderland beneath the waves. Sonically, ‘1983’/‘Moon’ is a masterpiece
of stereo panning and guitar-treatment techniques (slowing down and
speeding up tapes to depict a shoal of fish swimming up to check out the
human visitors, then darting away again; seagull noises created from
headphones feeding back into mics), with all the myriad components
painstakingly assembled and then mixed live in a way that anticipates
both dub reggae and ambient. All undulating flow and flickering
refraction, this is rock unrocked and uncocked, androgynised,
Jimi exploring the anima kingdom inside his own soul. There is nothing
else like it in rock except maybe Robert Wyatt's similarly
oceanic/amniotic Rock Bottom, Can's moonstruck ‘Come Sta La Luna’, John Martyn's dubby-bluesy shimmerscapes ‘I'd Rather Be The Devil’ and ‘Big Muff’.

Electric Ladyland
is sometimes accused of being somewhat self indulgent and
over-produced, but if anything it's not self-indulgent enough. The
double-album was, however, the climax of his burgeoning relationship
with engineer Eddie Kramer, who was able to implement Hendrix's vague
desires ("I want the sound of underwater") and who gradually displaced
the Experience as Jimi's foil and launchpad. With Ladyland less
like a power trio than a 300-piece guitar orchestra, songs like ‘All
Along the Watchtower’ and ‘Burning of the Midnight Lamp’ are stately
constructions rather than spontaneous combustions – haciendas and
pagodas gyrating in the sky.